Thursday, May 24, 2012

Romanian Education and Research Minister steps down because of plagiarism

One can hardly keep up anymore...

The Sunday Times reported that Ioan Meng, the new Romanian minister for Education and Research was accused of plagiarism in several of his papers. On May 16 the Neue Züricher Zeitungreported that he stepped down as minister after only one week in office.

Scientists in Japan, Taiwan and Israel noted numerous plagiarized passagen in his publications. Mang feels that this is just an attack from the opposition party. A German professor has also found text passages from his works in publications of Meng.

Update: Nature has a good article and notes that Romania has passed an anti-plagiarism law, introduced a National Ethics in Research council and determined that academics caught plagiarizing would lose their jobs. Interestingly enough, one of the plagiarisms was of a paper that the original author had withdrawn because he had discovered a flaw in the argument.

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Copy, Shake, and Paste

This blog is written by a German professor, Debora Weber-Wulff, who has been researching about plagiarism since 2002. She runs a German-language "Portal Plagiat" that regularly tests plagiarism detection software. She is also a member of the "Computing and Ethics" group of the German computing society, GI, and active in the VroniPlag Wiki.

Impressum

This private blog on scientific misconduct is run by Debora Weber-Wulff in Berlin, Germany. She can be reached at
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